“A Thin Gentleman With Gloves” (1943)

Here’s a pretty good story by August Derleth, writing under the name of Simon West in a pretty good anthology he edited, When Evil Wakes. In a way it’s part of an editor’s cheat, because Derleth also includes another story by himself, “The Tsanta in the Parlor” (also pretty good), writing as Stephen Grendon. There’s a third story credited to Derleth with H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shuttered Room,” although word is that Derleth wrote it from sketchy notes by Lovecraft some 20 years or more after Lovecraft’s death. It’s the weakest of his three stories in the anthology. But it’s a good anthology overall, and the other two Derleth efforts under pen names contribute nicely to it. “Thin Gentleman” is fairly obvious, involving a shady lawyer who defrauds his clients to support a gambling problem. In this story he is at work on cheating a woman named in the will of a man who recently died. We come to understand this man is a warlock. Her inheritance was to be 50,000 pounds (a lot of money in 1943) but the shyster boldly whittles it down to 1,000. The “thin gentleman” is basically the warlock’s enforcer. In life his constant companion (just behind and slightly to the side, with bowed head), he shows up on the peripheries anytime the lawyer gets out to the racetrack or is otherwise committing malfeasance. Seeing this mysterious thin gentleman makes the lawyer nervous, something about him seems familiar (no pun intended), but he never figures out what’s going on until too late. We’re way ahead of him. There are some nice notes toward the end, as when the thin man’s face is revealed. The lawyer disappears but eventually his body is found and that’s a nice gruesome grace note too. Take it home, man. Take it all the way home. I’ve read a few stories by the prolific Derleth, who preferred his reputation as the poet laureate of Wisconsin, author of Sac Prairie Saga, a collection of multiple volumes of fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and nonfiction nature writing. But he is also the man who arguably kept the pilot light burning on Lovecraft’s career, establishing Arkham House as a publishing home for the work of Lovecraft and many others. There’s little of the sludgy Lovecraft mythos in this story. It’s efficient, setting up the tension right away with the appalling amorality of the lawyer, and then layering in the witchery, which has much the air of the urbane yet slightly rancid Rosemary’s Baby movie. Civilized horror, suitable for teeming metropolises like Rome, London, and New York, anonymous masses, old brick buildings, and everybody minds their own business. The clues may be all but printed in red capitals in “Thin Gentleman”; the surprises are more in how it’s done. I wish more of these 20th-century writers were public domain so we could get more of them in one place.

When Evil Wakes, ed. August Derleth (out of print)
Story not available online.